A Corpus-based Study On Motivations For The Use Of Passive Voice In The English Translations Of Government Work Reports From 2000 To 2014

Passive voice is a kind of typical construction in English,which plays an important role in grammatical,textual and pragmatic functions.It has been long studied by scholars home and abroad.Foreign scholars mostly concentrate on the transformation of syntax and stylistic rhetoric whereas Chinese scholars mainly focus on the representation and meaning of passive voice in English.However,seldom has passive voice in political texts been focused.As a result,much food for thought can be unveiled from the research of passive voice in political texts.Based on the parallel corpora of government work reports which are constructed by SJTU teams,this thesis extracts passive voice in the English translations and adopts quantitative analysis of its application.From a vertical perspective,there are significant gaps between the use of passive voice among government work reports over the years with an overall tendency of decline that gets more and more lessening.From a horizontal perspective,critical differences emerge from the distributions of the use of passive voice in which the verb be and its inflection occupy the majority.This study demonstrates that the main motivations of these crucial differences are the language differences primarily in the structures of two languages,cognitive effects and pragmatic functions revealing the tremendous progress of the country as well as the improving confidence of our government.This study can offer more support of empirical research to studies on motivations of the use of passive voice in the English translations of Chinese political texts,and contribute to the comprehension of the application of passive voice in English versions of Chinese political texts.Furthermore,the approach of parallel corpora and the statistical analyses in this thesis can provide some insights for such studies in the future.